Amazon’s Alexa now has over 10,000 3rd-party skills

Amazon has revealed that Alexa has surpassed 10,000 skills. Alexa Skills are similar to phone apps, in that they are created by 3rd-parties to add functionality to the Amazon Echo, Echo Dot, Tap, Fire TV, and Fire TV Stick. The number of skills being created has shot up exponentially in recent months. Back when Amazon added the ability to rate and review skills a little over a year ago, there were only 91 skills. Just 6 months later, when Amazon improved skill discoverability and added the ability to enable skills by asking Alexa, the number of skills were up to 1,400. By the time Amazon finally launched dedicated web pages for Alexa skills five months later, there were over 4,000 skills. Now that number has more than doubled in just under 4 months.

Of course, just like with Fire TV apps, the number of total Alexa skills is not nearly as important as the number of quality skills. You’ll have to ignore a bunch of cookie cutter trivia games and fact skills to find ones that truly add value to your device.

I added skills to my Echo Dot to control my Harmony Ultimate Home Hub, hoping it would make it easy to use voice commands to change channels or activities, but so far have only gotten it to adjust volume or start/pause video play. Even then, it’s a mouthful, like “Alexa, tell Harmony to pause my movie” instead of “Alexa pause movie.”

I don’t feel amazed by Alexa having 10,000+ skills when it can’t do the thing FireTV users need most.

(Doesn’t help that Echo still does not control my Honeywell Lyric thermostat, either.)